1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to social proxies, and more particularly towards a user-defined social proxy for the graphical representation of physical and online environments.
2. Description of Prior Art
In the area of online user interaction, there are several efforts working towards creating a computer interface capable of displaying intangible qualities typically associated with live interaction. For example, Microsoft's® hierarchical file system interface, Babble, usage summaries for web sites, and The Palace (www.thepalace.com). These systems include elements which relate to attributes normally associated with a physical interaction. For example, by posting the number of visitors to a web site (e.g., usage summaries), a user can have a feeling of belonging to a larger group of people interested in that web site. These and other systems are described below.
FTP allows online users “anonymous”—to have access to a collection of documents; one or more users being authorized to add documents to the collection. No other styles of interaction are definable by the users. (See Ed Krol, The Whole Internet Catalog. O'Reilly and Associates, Inc. Sebastopol, Calif. 1992.)
NNTP or network news, provides a venue in which users can asynchronously post messages and responses into administered news groups (i.e., predefined groups of messages which are meant to relate to specified topic, e.g., all articles in alt.sport.soccer should deal with soccer). Only loosely structured forms of interaction are provided, e.g., query-and-respond, which are not then enforced. No other styles of interaction are user definable.
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is similar to NNTP in that it allows users to post messages and responses in predefined topic areas—called channels in IRC. The main difference with IRC is that the interactions are synchronous rather than asynchronous as in NNTP. Just as with NNTP, IRC does not enable users to define structured forms of interaction which include rules of enforcement.
Loom, a visualization tool for Usenet (NNTP) news groups, provides a technique for displaying the emotional mood (e.g., hostile, happy) of an NNTP-based online community (e.g., a Usenet news group) by analyzing the content of its interactions. Although this utility can analyze online interactions and provide a graphical representation of aspects of the interactions, it does not provide a way for users to define structured styles of interaction. (See Judith Donath et al. “Visualizing Conversation” published in the Journal of Computer Mediated Conversation. Volume 4, number 4, June 1999.)
Babble provides dynamic indicators of the presence and activity of all operational users with respect to the available topics (i.e., discussion areas created by the users). These indicators are computed using the activities of the participants (e.g., connections, postings, and topic switches). Although lightly structured styles of interaction are frequently adopted (e.g., interaction in the “—Commons Area—” is informal conversation, while interaction in the “Babble Problems” topic consists of serious question/answer dialogs), no way is provided for users to formally specify structured styles of interaction and then have them enforced. (See Thomas Erickson, et al. “Socially Translucent Systems: Social Proxies, Persistent Conversation, and the Design of ‘Babble.”’ published in Human Factors in Computing Systems: The Proceedings of CHI '99. ACM Press, 1999.)
Online games, like chess and bridge (e.g., Chessmaster 6000 by Mindscape, Inc.), provide structured and enforced styles of interaction, but not ones that (1) can be defined by the users, the rules all being predefined; (2) that can have the rules changed by the users during a game (e.g., “A queen can leap from anywhere to anywhere”); and (3) that include user defined rules of enforcement.
The Palace (www.thepalace.com), is a collection of Internet chat rooms. The site uses a graphical display and user icons. A Palace Site is an online community where users can come together and chat while being represented by a graphical image. There are thousands of existing Palace Sites. Users can connect to The Palace Sites with The Palace Viewer (TPV) or The Palace User Software. Currently, there are eight channels: Welcome, TV, Movies, Music, Romance, Indie, Teens, and International. A channel refers to a specific category of Palace Sites. Inside each channel is a collection of Palace Sites related to that category. TPV allows users to visit Palace Sites through their web browsers. With TPV and The Palace Server, a user can add a Palace community to a web site. The Palace User Software enables a user to connect to all the different Palace Sites located in Palace Space.
Coordinator, a method of structuring human communications, provides an electronic mail-based system that allows users to structure conversations and track tasks. For example, a typical interaction begins with a “Request” message from person A to person B, requesting something from person B by a certain date. This e-mail note asks Person B to respond with a “Promise” message (promising to perform the action), with a “Decline” message (declining to perform the action), or with a “Counteroffer” message (offering to perform the action by a different date or to perform a different action). If B promises to do the action, then a typical conversation might continue with B, eventually sending a “Report completion” message (indicating that the action has been performed) and A replying with a “Close” message (indicating that the action was performed satisfactorily). (See: Flores et al. “Method and Apparatus for Structuring and Managing Human Communications By Explicitly Defining the Types of Communications Permitted Between Participants.” U.S. Pat. No. 5,208,748, May, 4, 1993.)
The Oval implementation of Coordinator extends the base functionality by allowing end-users to modify interaction rules mid interaction (see Malone et al. “Experiments with Oval: A Radically Tailorable Tool for Cooperative Work” via URL http://ccs.mit.edu/papers/CCSWP1181/index.html#4b).
Thus Coordinator, implemented with Oval allows users to define and maintain structured styles of online interaction. Users are still unable to (1) provide rules of enforcement; (2) switch from one user-defined genre to another during a given interaction (e.g., reassign the roles of the participants); and (3) handle interactions where messages are posted to a group of recipients, all of whom are not known a priori (e.g., as is the case in an online lecture where the speaker broadcasts his speech to whomever is listening). Also, Coordinator/Oval allows users to specify rules specifying the graphical/iconic representation of the state of their conversations, initial, as well as the for the effect of rule violations (e.g., a particular change in the color of interrupter's icon).
Therefore, a need exists for a method of representing physical and virtual environments, including user profiles, in a user-defined structured graphical form, wherein variables are dynamically updated.